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Raspberry Pi

I'm sure everyone has already heard this from yesterday... but yes after believing there wouldn't be a new Raspberry Pi release for 2018 because nothing was announced at the end of Feb., the Raspberry Pi foundation pulled a fast one on Pi Day by announcing a new revision of the Raspberry Pi 3B. They added a + to the end of it: Raspberry Pi 3B+.

What's new? They improved power regulation and cooling of the CPU enabling a default clockrate 200MHz faster than the previous Pi (1.4GHz). They totally refreshed the radio components (with a nice RPi logo stamped on the cover of it) bumping the wifi to dual-band 802.11ac and Blutooth 4.2. They also improved ethernet performance making it "faster ethernet" but just under 1GBit along with 4 new pins for Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) capabilities with an add-on HAT. Overall it is a cleaner design and the best Raspberry Pi to date.

While some had hoped for a doubling of the RAM (still only 1GB) that just wasn't in the cards as RAM prices have been significantly increasing over the last year and it is very important to the Raspberry Pi Foundation to keep the price point at $35.

Quite a few reviewers got a hold of the new model early and were able to post informative videos on YouTube including some benchmarks. Retailers don't quite have them in stock yet but will RSN. I already put in my order with Newark and it should be shipping in about 10 days. I hope to get FedBerry going on mine for a desktop Fedora system. I'll post about that when the time comes. In the meantime, enjoy the following brief video mentioning what's new in the Raspberry Pi 3B+.

Update: My Rpi3B+ arrived on Monday, March 19th. Wow, that was fast. I couldn't find the case I had so I haven't had time to play with it yet. For some reason, it seems smaller than previous models.

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I've been running FedBerry 24 on my Rasperry Pi 3 for some time now. It has been hooked up to the HDTV in the back bedroom. While I don't use it on a daily basis, I do try to login to it once a week or so and keep it updated... and reboot whenever there is a kernel update. Given the rate of Fedora updates and frequent FedBerry kernel updates, the project is fairly active.

What is FedBerry? FedBerry is a Fedora-remix made by three guys who have built glue packages for Fedora's ARM release and produced a few different images for the RPi 2 and Pi 3. Download the .tar.xz, decompress and write it to a microSD card, insert card into Raspberry Pi... and snap... you have Fedora. They started with Fedora 23, are on Fedora 24 now, and fairly recently released packages for Fedora 25... although no images for Fedora 25 yet.

As I write this, I'm in the middle of upgrading my F24 system to F25. The number of packages the FedBerry folks have to produce is pretty small. They are mostly related to the kernel and various branding packages. It really isn't that far away from Fedora's ARM build. Fedora has said that they are working on getting a release to run on the Raspberry Pi but historically there have been a few roadblocks that over time have been dissolving. The main ones were with kernel support that wasn't in mainline and/or proprietary and the use of the FAT filesystem for the boot partition... or something like that. I read a few blog posts on it a couple of months ago but don't remember the exact details.

Anyhoo, I run XFCE and a host of other common desktop software on the RPi3 and it works great. While it is no speed demon, all of the hardware works including the wifi. I can ssh into it and even connect to it via x2go for a remote XFCE session. Overall, I'm very impressed with FedBerry.

I will update this post with info on how the upgrade went. The FedBerry devs didn't announce their F25 packages, or at least not that I saw, but I noticed a 25 directory on their repo site and thought I'd stick my neck out. If it fails on me, it would really be my fault for being a earlier-than-early adopter... but so far it seems to be working.

Update: The upgrade went fine. Rebooted and had a 4.9.2 Linux kernel. FB24 had 4.4.41. All the hardware continues to work fine. Thanks FedBerry!

The method I used was: dnf system-upgrade download --nogpgcheck --releasever=25 followed by dnf system-upgrade reboot

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Heard of the Up SoC yet? It is an alternative to the Raspberry Pi but Intel Atom-based. It's a quad-core 64-bit CPU that includes an Intel HD video chipset with hardware acceleration for H.264, HEVC (H.265 decode) and VP8. They have designed it to have a super-set of the Raspberry Pi's hardware feature set in the same form factor. It draws 2 watts of power over 5VDC. Cost? About 3x that of the Raspberry Pi. I wonder if the Atom CPU in question is closer in performance to a Desktop PC CPU than the quad-core ARM in the Raspberry Pi 2?

If you have working WebGL in your browser, you should see a nice, interactive, 3D model below. No flash-plugin required.

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